LIBERAL PUNDITS "CASHIER" VICTORY IN IRAQ

A brief reply by Con George-Kotzabasis to

Chickens Coming Home To Roost

Ed Kilgore TPM CAFE December 27, 2006


It might turn out to be most unwise for pundits to rush and "cashier" victory in Iraq. According to most liberals, the Bush Doctrine and the reasons for the war in Iraq are collapsing like unravelled myths. So declares Ed Kilgore in his piece on TPM Cafe. But it's still possible, against all the odds of the prescience of Bush's critics about the unwinnable war in Iraq, that 2007 will be "Annus Mirabilis" for Bush, with the implementation of a new strategy and tactics in Iraq that will deliver victory, and hence "implode" the wisdom of the pundits.

POLITICAL CORRECTNESS: THE CONTINUATION OF “REVOLUTION” BY OTHER MEANS

Con George-Kotzabasis

A specter is haunting freedom of speech the specter of political correctness. All the moral and political values of democracy, liberalism, individualism, freedom of speech and expression, are haunted and cast out as empty and false bourgeois values, as they were by Marxian revolutionaries in the past. Under the “revolutionary” order of political correctness, these values have no substantial right to exist, if they are going to be used to criticize and call into account the self-appointed guardians of the less privileged in our society. Needless to say, no votary of this new dispensation would concede that the adoption of the precepts of political correctness would suborn and undermine these venerable values of democracy. And without any doubt, the followers of political correctness would consider such an accusation as laughably nonsensical and a calumny to their true position.

It’s not unusual, however, for people who are so clearly aware and conscious of their thoughts and actions, to be completely oblivious and unconscious of the consequences that emanate from these same thoughts and actions. In the “blind rage” of their “correctness”, they cannot see nor can they imagine the wide and meandering ramifications of outcomes their precepts are engendering, and in the darkness of their blindness, they cannot perceive where the latter are leading. For once you proscribe, even by implication, certain ideas and opinions, or by giving them red neck status, and forbid their voicing or prescribe the form of their expression, you erode the value-hold these ideas have in the general community, hence making it more easy for people not to adopt and not to express them in the form of their own liking. Consequently you deprive people their inalienable right, in a democracy, both to voice and express ideas in accordance to their individual wishes and preferences, i.e., to choose the forms and figures of speech by which to articulate them. In the past, phrenologists use to put mad people in straitjackets. Presently, the high priests of political correctness are putting reasonable conventions in the straitjacket of their own “madness”.

The followers of political correctness have deliberately chosen not to conduct the debate of their propositions before the court of reason, but in the emotionally charged precincts of the boudoir. Whence they can dub and castigate their opponents with the emotive terms of racist, sexist, etc. with the purpose of shutting them up. Where reason is absent, however, the issues that are important to the advancement and public good of a society tend to swing to-and-fro without resolution. Even when a resolution is reached its outcome, more often than not, arises from a bad compromise that the best side of the argument makes to the worst, due to the mistaken belief that it’s better to come to some sort of conclusion, even by means of a bad compromise, than to no conclusion at all.
The protagonists of political correctness, in the torpor of their satiated intellectual state, are not aware that they are conceiving and are giving birth to a “Frankenstein”, who will wreak havoc on the institutional values of a democratic society. Nor are they conscious that by succeeding in dubbing certain forms of speech and expression as socially unacceptable, they will crack the foundation upon which a democratic society functions. The vigor and robustness of liberal institutions depend wholly and utterly in the strong disposition and will of the people to exercise their democratic rights regularly and fearlessly and not let them fall in a state of desuetude.The latter is a real danger and no hyperbole. In contemporary democratic societies, when human rights and social justice are strongly stitched in the social fabric and have great political and moral appeal among the people, it would not be difficult for a small group of political activists, who ostensibly profess to represent the interests of the less privileged and less favored among us, to persuade a sizeable part of the majority that political correctness not only protects and augments the rights of the under privileged, but it’s also a better fit to our democratic structure in alleviating, and, indeed, in eliminating injustice, than the “formal freedoms”, according to them, that emanate from liberal institutions. The latter, after all, from their radical perspective, are no more than the instruments by which the powerful are depriving the socially indigent from their rights, with the outcome of keeping the latter in a permanent state of disempowerment. The acceptance of such a proposition by a large number of people, as well as by many Labor politicians, is already becoming de rigueur. Especially, when it’s supported and promoted by the artfully “credible” voice of sections of academia, as well as by the fourth estate, the media, which has chosen, with some exceptions, to shroud its critical faculties behind a veil of darkness, avoiding to criticize the paltriness of reasoning that is embedded in such a proposition. That the influence of political correctness is real, and that it can determine the discourse of political and civil debate in our society, or stifle it, is demonstrated by three recently published events.


CONCRETE EXAMPLES OF POLITICAL CORRECTNESSFirst, the maladministration of the financial affairs of ATSIC and the venal practices of some of its leaders, have been known by at least one former minister of Aboriginal affairs, almost five years ago. Yet that minister refused to investigate these serious allegations and directed his department not to probe into them, apparently being concerned and fearful of the backlash that would have risen against him and the government from most leaders of the Aboriginal community. Who would have slurred such an investigation and they would have claimed, as they do now, that such investigation would have brought reconciliation to an end. It was due to this reason, that the former minister abandoned his ministerial responsibility.
Secondly, in the Easton Affair, Carmen Laurence, the premier of Western Australia, before and after her condemnation by the Royal Commission, was able to cover her brazen lies behind the hood of sisterhood. All the feminists were up in arms against anyone who would dare to criticize her. The feminist lobby of political correctness and its supporters within the Federal Labor Government were able to seduce and mobilize a “glitterati” of ministers and the Prime Minister Paul Keating, to defend the indefensible. Despite the doubt and moral apprehensions some of them, in all probability, might have had, about the veracity of their Labor colleague Laurence. Ostensibly, not even the former government’s glitterati would have dared to confront the wrath of the feminists. On the altar of political expediency and political correctness they sacrificed their moral and intellectual integrity, which fatefully led to a further lowering of their political credibility, and which in turn contributed significantly to their electoral defeat. What was more disturbing, however, was the conspicuous absence of the moral and intellectual leadership of the country, and of the media almost as a whole, on this primarily important issue. That is, whether public personae had an absolute obligation to uphold the moral values of our society, and to tell the truth. What made the keepers and upholders of our moral values, our academics and church leaders, to be so closed-lipped on this fundamentally important issue? Were they afraid, that if they had spoken publicly and condemning this mendacity coming from a premier, they would be stung by the “bee” of political correctness? And was the media too, with some exceptions—one of which was Laura Tingle of The Australian—afraid of this same sting? As on this issue of the Easton Affair, it transmogrified the fourth-estate into the last estate, apparently, without any professional pangs of conscience!Thirdly, the welfare state, which in a short time would become in so many areas the fraudulent state, and its extensive abuse, must have been known to government officials—and if it wasn’t known, these officials would be just as culpable both for the grossness of their ignorance and professional ineptitude. Yet these high officials and their ministers, with the exception of some of the more blatant abuses for which few persons were prosecuted, were unwilling to enter this hornet’s nest and initiate a commission of inquiry that would expose this widespread abuse of the welfare system. When the Paxton family was criticized for its lack of zeal, to say the least, to abandon the state of their unemployment, all the guardian angels of the welfare state were in full flight accusing the critics of being insensitive and unfair to the plight and distress that the members of the Paxton family were experiencing. And, indeed, that such critique was an invasion of their privacy. No lesser institution than the ABC adopted such a line of political correctness. Stuart Littlemore, of Media Watch, criticized Channel Nine for pillorying the Paxton family. If the powerful and independent ABC can be coaxed and allured by the “trendy” etiquettes of political correctness, what else can lesser mortals do than succumb to these same etiquettes?


THE LABOR OPPOSITION TURNS A BLIND EYE

What is astonishingly surprising however, is the statement of the leader of the Opposition, Kim Beazley, that there is no “wholesale fraud” in welfare payments. In a recent Four Corner’s program on the ABC, that covered the issue of outdoor workers in the clothing and textiles industries, the unions covering these two industries claimed, that there were at least three hundred thousand people who were working in these industries and who were rapaciously exploited by employers. In the course of the documentary, it was revealed that the majority of these workers were at the same time receiving some form of welfare payments that they were not entitled to receive as employed workers, as well as not paying any taxes on the wages they were receiving.

The unions had known for years of the existence of this outdoor work and had made several approaches to the former Labor government to stop this rampant exploitation that was affecting migrants by appropriate legislation. In this context therefore, the statement of Kim Beazley, to say the least, is puzzling. With such a large “population” of employees receiving unemployment or welfare payments that they were not eligible to receive and for the leader of the Opposition to state that there is “no wholesale fraud” in the welfare system, one can only say that apparently Kim Beazley is no “populist” and therefore cannot be blamed for not having a “populous” definition of wholesale fraud.

The paramount question is why, with such overwhelming evidence of fraud the former Labor government abdicated its responsibility and did not do anything about this widespread fraud of which obviously was aware and instead adopted the ‘don’t rock the boat’ attitude? Was it apprehensive that if it had set up an investigation in regards to it, it would trigger the animadversion of the welfare and ethnic lobbies? And beyond the political embarrassment that it would bear, if such investigation verified the existence of the fraud, was it also the “rattles” of political correctness that such a probe would cause which cowered the former government from exercising its responsibility? But beyond any doubt, in all these three events it was the perverse influence of political correctness that led to the eclipse of political probity and responsibility.
From whence comes political correctness? The collapse and burial of the revolutionary utopia in Eastern Europe and in the former Soviet Union have left a withered crop of revolutionary and radical ideologues spiritually and ideologically homeless. The levity of the utopia however, too proud to admit defeat, has levitated these homeless ideologues into the haven of political correctness, breathing, hence, into its revolutionary progeny a new lease on life. The show trials of the future will be staged therefore by a radical elite of political correctness ensconced in academia, and by a motley of followers, i.e., feminists, gayists, indigenists, multiculturalists, and a miscellany of lobbyists, who, under the august values of justice, tolerance, equal opportunity, and diversity, will be setting up new “Gulag archipelagos”, where freedom of speech and expression will be incarcerated and muzzled. Political correctness is the continuation of "revolution” by other means. But the “pushers” of this revolution are like an "ageing actor's face full of often acted artificial passions", to quote the wunderkind Orson Welles, and feigned roles. And like all the artificial and extreme experiments of the social, political, and economic engineers of the past, who by a set of panaceas and fanciful ideas tried to change the course of history and failed, the attempt of the adherents of political correctness to cripple the march of reason and put it on crutches, will also fail.


The above paper was written in June 1996

Dear Reader,

I would immensely appreciate your critical comments on the articles below, as only through critique can we improve and deepen our knowledge about the issues that are important to the betterment of mankind. It would be foolish and arrogant for anyone to claim that he/she possesses the truth. It's the search for truth, to paraphrase the German playwright Gotthold Lessing, that is the great challenge to open minds.

Con George-Kotzabasis

HAIL DIPLOMATIC CONSENSUS AND FALL

INTO TERRORIST HELL

Con George-Kotzabasis

I
Madeleine Albright, in her article " Bridges, Bombs, or Bluster," published in Foreign Affairs, criticizes the Bush administration in its war against Iraq, for using the "shock of force" to trump "the hard work of diplomacy". Both, the substance and the tenor of her argument, reveal her irrepressible desire and concern to defend her metier, as the former primary diplomat in the Clinton administration, as well as justify the latter's timorous and inutile stand against terror. Precisely, to quote her, “Clinton saw terror as a team enterprise, not a solo act”, because of this misperception, Clinton's administration failed to do anything effective against terror during his two terms in office. Moreover, by refusing to take a strong stand against terrorism, a stand that would necessarily shed American blood, in the likes of a top Madison Avenue advertiser, he advertised, with incomparable historical foolishness, the Mogadishu complex to the world at large and to the Muslim fundamentalists and their death squads, with devastating consequences, that America was too scared to spill its blood in defending itself, even against the most ominous and heinous acts of terror.

The former Secretary, with one word of hers, nolens volens, exposes this diplomatic failure of Clinton and her own during their term in office, and with the same "stabbing" word, she stabs her argument for diplomacy to death. She states, that Clinton “tried” to halt WMD proliferation and the need of nations to unite to eliminate terrorist sanctuaries and their funding. The complete failure of the former President to achieve these objectives however, precisely was, a result of his dependence solely on the overtures of diplomacy. And instead of addressing and redressing this floundering of diplomacy, the former President chose to "runaway" from the "draft" of leadership. President Bush, in contrast, persuaded by his Secretary of State, went to the UN and made intense efforts to convince his allies of the strategic necessity to invade Iraq as a quintessential part of the war against terror. And only when these efforts failed to become fecund, indeed, only when the even "amorous passes" of Colin Powell failed to break the pretentious "chastity belt" of France, Germany, and Russia, President Bush, with the characteristic strength of his Administration, decided to go to war "solo", with the Coalition of the willing, and refused to runaway from the draft of leadership.

Diplomacy is a voracious consumer of time, and the latter is a key element to its success. In war however, timing is the sine qua non for its success. A nation, as the US does, that faces a great apocalyptic imminent threat and waits for diplomatic consensus, before it takes forceful and preemptive action against such a threat, chooses to fall, in this case, into the terrorist's hell.

Secretary Albright, seeks “redemption” not through contrition, for the "abortions" of diplomacy, under her term in office, but through diplomatic alienation. For to persist obstinately, especially in critical circumstances, in the wiles of diplomacy, when it's obvious that all its efforts are failing, is to alienate the art of diplomacy.

Historians, when they will make their comparisons, will aver that Madeleine Albright's "orbiting" around the State Department, was far off the planetary force of a Dean Acheson or of a Henry Kissinger. Secretary Albright's censure of the Bush administration is Nonebright.

The above is an extract from my book, Unveiling the War Against Terror, written on August 30, 2003

MOUNT GLOBALIZATION OR BE ITS PREY


Con George-Kotzabasis

A tiger is stalking the world the tiger of globalization. Nations and peoples who, gazelle-like, are frightened and take flight before the huge ferocious “life-threatening” leaps and bounds of this tiger, are to be mauled and be eaten, as no swift flight can make them escape from the lightning speed with which globalization pursues its quarry.

For this will be the fate of nations and peoples who chose to be the prey instead of being the “hunter” of globalization. To be the hunter however, does not imply that one has to slay the “beast” of globalization. Instead, it implies that like a consummate broncobuster, one has to mount the tiger and adapt to its fast and sinewy movements while at the same time “taming” it.

This is the only way that countries can save themselves from the threatening onslaught of globalization. More importantly still, to be among its winners. But it’s fundamentally important to be prudent winners, that is, the winner does not take all. No clever country or wise person would desire to be an absolute winner. Only gamblers would crave to be so. But the wins of a casino are ephemeral wins, and soon and inevitably are followed by loses. Hence. If the winners of globalization wish and aspire to keep and to augment their gains, it’s necessary that they look after and take care of the losers of globalization, as the latter can only be politically sustained and continue to succeed and be beneficial to mankind if it’s a “caring globalization”, if its heart is the “make –up” of its robust mien. If not, it will face the freezing winds of a backlash of a ‘winter of discontent’, of all the countries and peoples who are fearful of its storming of the globe. Its losers therefore will be diffident and distrustful of the touted benefits that could accrue to them, and hence reluctant to admit the Lexus into the groves of their olive trees, to paraphrase Thomas Friedman, of the New York Times

The currently unstoppable revolution in technology, finance, and information, has made all nations vulnerable to the waves of global competition. Only those nations that swim on the crests of these waves will survive and be the winners in this relentless struggle. This implies moreover, that no nation can economically survive in isolation even if it possesses unique and an abundance of natural resources. Nor can it appeal to the bungled remedies of the past, such as the provision of subsidies to defunct industries. Nor can it depend on the invention of new populist nostrums, such as “fair trade” proposed by the dinosaur delegates in a Labor Party Conference in Hobart. On the contrary, only through the process of creative reconstruction in the economic, industrial, commercial, and social structures of a country, is the ”waydrome” to success. In this context, to talk about fair trade is to live in dodo fairyland. Indeed, it’s like asking Olympian super athletes, like Cathy Freeman, to be fair to their lesser competitors.


HOW TO DEAL WITH THE CHALLENGE OF GLOBALIZATION


Thomas Friedman in his book, ‘The Lexus and the Olive Tree’, argues, that ‘the revolution in technology, finance, and information did three things. It lowered the barriers of entry into almost any business, and it rapidly increased competition and the speed by which a product moves from being an innovation to being a commodity.’ Technology expands production to global dimensions, ‘knitting the world together.’ Finance with the collapse of regulated exchange rates, penetrates all the profitable niches of the world in its avaricious dynamic drive for profit. No raising of granite protective walls or the setting up of any barriers can prevent the ‘ “Electronic Herd’s” ‘ power to move its capital on world markets. Furthermore, information technology ‘brings home to everyone how ahead or behind they are in contrast to other countries.’ This provides a cue and spurs people to invest in countries where lucrative profits can be made by ‘investing through the internet on a global scale.’ Hence, the world is no longer carried on the back of the slow moving Atlas, but on the back of the swift electron-moving Microchip. In such a world all kind of barriers have the strength of a plastic balloon. But even if it were possible to erect impenetrable barriers, the countries that did so would bring upon themselves “the day after”, the consequences of “nuclear” economic and social devastation. That is, the result for these countries would be to throw themselves into the abyss of poverty and squalor, and hence unwittingly deprive their people the opportunity to become wealthier by being on the trajectory of globalization.

It’s by accepting the challenges of globalization with imagination and boldness that countries and their peoples will not only be strengthening their intellectual and moral fiber that will position them on the launching pad of globalization, but will also be transporting them to the land of cornucopia, to material and spiritual abundance. It’s imperative therefore, that political leaders deliberately and consciously decide to prepare their people to enter into this benign circle of feedback. That is, the intellectual and moral strength and knowledge of their people will maximize the benefits accruing from globalization and minimize its disadvantages. And the successes of actively being engaged with the cutting-edge of the globe will in turn further enhance this intellectual and moral vigor and knowledge of their people. In such a brave new world, one has to tell people to ‘remove their belongings’, to use a phrase of Vladimir Nabokov, of moaning. There is no room for resentment and gripe against countries and peoples who succeed. Success itself will be redistributed and will not remain in the same hands. Everyone will have the opportunity, endowed with grit, chutzpah, and entrepreneurial flair, to succeed.

For the first time in human history, globalization has the potential to bring in its wake the “democratization of success”. No scion of elites will be able to capture its benefits and lock them up ever safely and ever after in their vaults. The microchip is sovereign. Hence the corridors of wealth will be accessible to all who have the knowledge and ambition to use it. And if Shakespearian sovereigns could trade their kingdoms for a horse, business scions, like James Packer, will have to trade their wealth and power for a microchip.

Globalization also has the potential to usher in the empowerment of all classes and creeds. Ironically, capitalist globalization might realize Marx’s dream- the fulfillment of the individual who performs his practical affairs during the day, fishes in the evening, and writes and “practices” poetry during the night. And to cap it all, the Communist Manifesto’s slogan, “workers of the world unite”, could be accomplished by globalization. The only difference being that the unity of workers will not arise out of enmity against capitalist entrepreneurs, but out of the benign desire to emulate the achievements of the latter, as every worker with the required training and knowledge will have the ability of doing so.


HOW TO RAISE ALL BOATS AND CANOES IN THIS INUNDATION OF GLOBALIZATION


We need however to be critically aware of the downside of globalization and treat its blemishes effectively. It’s a truism that not all people will benefit from globalization. There will be losers! In all civilizations there have been winners and losers. The human race cannot jump over the shadow of this accursed fact. Either as a result of individual propensities or lack of resilience and ability to adapt to the new, and strenuous circumstances of globalization, many people will fall behind and will be disadvantaged. But because of globalization’s vast production of wealth, it has the capacity to compensate the losers, and indeed, to pull them out of their disadvantaged position. In this task governments will play a decisive role.

First, they will have to deal with the backlash that arises from people who are struck with the dire effects of globalization. While globalization shortens the distances of the world and makes it accessible to many people and improves economically their well-being, at the same time it lengthens the rusty chain of un- economic and defunct industries in many developed and developing countries. Many workers, therefore, who for years worked in these industries, are thrown out of them and find themselves unemployed and unemployable. The direct beneficiaries of globalization therefore, not only have a moral responsibility, but also a vested interest, to take care of the disenfranchised from the advantages of globalization, if the latter are to be prevented from being converted into modern Luddites, and start smashing the machine of globalization, by means of war, terrorism, and computer hacking.

Secondly, to head off and pacify this backlash, governments will have to prise open new thinking horizons, and to transform this resentment into support for globalization. Since inequality among human beings, as well as of other primates, is nature’s regime, governments must contrive clever policies to redress and reverse this order of inequality and bring some sort of balance in this inequity of nature. In the “clever” country, prosperity does not have to be equated with “equality”. People do not have to be equal in certain natural endowments with those who generate wealth and prosperity, to share the fruits of this prosperity. The process of globalization begets such huge wealth that it would not be difficult for governments to impose the burden upon, and indeed persuade, its producers, that it’s to their own interest to share part of this wealth with the disadvantaged of globalization. Especially, when this divestment of wealth will not diminish the capital investment funds of the former, as we will show below.

Thirdly, governments will redistribute this part of wealth by the following international multilateral policy mechanism, by imposing a levy or surtax on the profits of all “globetrotting” corporations, financial institutions, and foreign currency speculators. Once, these funds of the levy are collected by governments, they will be transmitted to an international body set up by these governments. Let us name this body the International Globalization Fund (IGF). The central task of this entity will be (a) to identify those nations and peoples whose livelihood has been affected negatively by globalization, and (b) to subsidize the buying of shares in multinational corporations and world financial institutions, by these nations and peoples. In the case of some people who might not have any financial savings of their own, the IGF will provide them with special securities or bonds, thus enabling them, despite their lack of savings, to be shareholders in this international economy. Moreover, such a policy will not engender any disincentives to private enterprise. As the funds accruing from the levy will not be spend by governments in fuzzy, boondoggle industrial plans or in subsidizing defunct industries, at the expense of the private sector. The build up of a “hydraulic pipe” between the international economy and the disadvantaged of this economy, will allow the funds that are transmitted to the latter in the form of subsidies and securities by the IGF, to be sluiced back through this pipe to the multinational corporations in the form of equity capital. Hence, the investment funds of these entrepreneurial entities will not be diminished.

Thus, the eyes of all, not only of those who gain directly from their engagement with globalization, will be focused on the screens of the computers. Even people who lack knowledge and adeptness to use the modern technology will enter and be denizens of this brave new world of the internet, as equity holders. Sharing the wealth that is spawned by the Midas microchip touch of globalization. The magic flying carpet of globalization will have everyone aboard.

It depends on the creative thinking, imagination and Thatcherite will and determination of governments whether globalization will be politically and economically sustainable. And whether by riding it, the fruits of its wealth will also be distributed to all those nations and peoples whose livelihoods are going to be lost in this process of ‘creative destruction’. Whether the opening of the floodgates of globalization will raise all boats and canoes in this global inundation of its waters.




The article was written on September 17, 2001, and was first published in the English supplement of Neos Kosmos

"LIES" ABOUT THE WAR THE BIGGEST LIE OF ALL

Con George-Kotzabasis

A chirping sound and fury of a swarm of crickets from their grassy, weedless, "manicured estates" of politics, the media, academes, and bishoprics are endeavoring to muffle the sound of reason as to why America and its staunch and historically insightful allies went to war against Saddam Hussein.

The critics of the war in their impassioned fiery endeavor to impugn and discredit the Bush, Blair, and Howard governments, are far from being morally and intellectually hampered from using meretricious arguments to make their case against the war. The English essayist Chesterton observed, 'where is the best place to hide a leaf? His answer was ‘in a tree'. The opponents of the war observe, 'where is the best place to hide the truth? Their answer is ‘in a lie'. Hence, they fabricated the biggest lie of all, with the aim to conceal the truth about the war. After their lugubrious doomsday cries and forecasts about hundreds of thousands of casualties, of humanitarian disasters, floods of refugees, and bogged-down Vietnams, all of which failed to materialize, either in Afghanistan or Iraq, they now "pin-up" their arguments on the Americans' unsuccessful efforts to find weapons of mass destruction ( WMD ), and on the inability of its armed forces to win the peace in Iraq. As if these two goals could be accomplished in parallel with the ending of major combat operations, in a regime which brutally oppressed its own people for thirty years, and which practiced the concealment of its development of WMD in the form of an exact science. And which, despite its swift defeat in the war, it still has a paladin of sturdy supporters, whose lament of losing power is inevitably transformed into a vigorous opposition to the American-led coalition forces.

The peaceniks, desperate to find a straw to save themselves from intellectual drowning in this ocean of failed predictions and "displaced" conceptions, have now concocted this lie, that the American, British, and Australian administrations were mendacious to their peoples about the imminent threat that Saddam Hussein posed to the civilized world. In this forlorn effort to justify their position, brazenly and shamelessly distort David Kay's report to Congress about Hussein's WMD, by focusing on the present fact that no such weapons were found, and triumphantly deduce from this, that Hussein was not an imminent threat against the West. But in this ignominious exercise, they totally disregard the other crucial elements of his findings, that clearly substantiate, that the regime retained intact an infrastructure that could develop WMD at short notice.


The eminent columnist of the Washington Post, Charles Krauthammer, in his column of the ...Post on 10 October wrote, that Iraq maintained 'an infrastructure ( laboratories, equipment, trained scientists,detailed plans ) that could "break out" and ramp up production of [ WMD ] when needed... Just in Time... That David Kay found the infrastructure but as yet no finished product'. And again, as reported in the Washington Post on 7 October, David Kay had found strains of organism in a scientist's home that could be used to produce biological agents. He had also found documents for resuming uranium enrichment efforts for the development of nuclear weapons, and a clandestine network of laboratories that contained equipment for continuing chemical-biological weapons research, as well as SA-2 surface-to-air missiles which could be transformed into ballistic missiles with a range of 250 miles, exceeding the 150 miles range which Iraq was allowed to have by the U.N. .

This is the thundering truth about Hussein's secret program to activate the development of WMD, whenever his regime thought it would be safe to do so, that the critics of the war are vainly attempting to muffle and still. The ABC presenter of the 7.30 Report, Kerry O'Brien, in his interview of the U.S. Ambassador, Tom Schieffer, was picking selectively from the Kay report to make his flimsy case about the unnecessariness of the war in Iraq - who obsessively and indefatigably has been doing since even before the commencement of hostilities in Iraq - and leaving out the key elements of the report which verified without any doubt, that the Hussein regime had the capability to develop and produce WMD at a time of its own choosing.

It is inconceivable, that while Iran, Hussein's arch enemy and rival in the region, had plans to develop nuclear weapons, Hussein would not have known this, and had he known it, he would commit geopolitical hara-kiri, by choosing to go into "nuclear hibernation". That he would stop unilaterally and altruistically all his plans to develop the same weapons. Such an action on his part, would strategically have placed him in a most vulnerable position, and would have made him a hostage to his primary foe in the region. Moreover, such conduct would entail, the discarding and abandonment of all his ambitions and grandiose plans to be the new Saladin of the Arab world, which would be completely out of character. This kind of transubstantiation from a ruthlessly ambitious dictator to a votary of the Dalai Lama, would be the mother of all miracles.

This logic just does not click. Yet it is by this reasoning that the opponents of the war are constructing their case against it. As their core argument was and is, that Hussein was never an imminent threat against the West, and crown the "correctness" of their contention on the fact that no WMD have been found. But I dare say, that not before long, this crown will be a crown of thorns around their heads, and there will be no intellectual resurrection from the naivety that nailed them on the "believers" cross of the bloodthirsty dictator. That this sleight of hand artist was able to dupe and blindfold them in regards to the clandestine network of laboratories and scientists he had in place, and could produce WMD on his orders at the appointed time, will be to their eternal shame.

As for the word 'imminent', that also is a spurious invention of the opponents of the war. Neither Bush nor Blair, nor any other senior member of their administrations, ever said that Hussein's regime posed an imminent threat to the free world. What President Bush said, was that Hussein's development and possession of WMD and his links with terrorism, posed a grave and gathering danger against the civilized world. In a world of global terror however, this future gathering danger is not years ahead but too near at hand not to consider it as imminent. Indeed, in a world of unleashed fanatic terror, all the actions that the latter could launch are imminent. The terrorists pose a continuous threat to the world, therefore it would be the culmination of foolishness on the part of those who are been targeted, not to take these threats as imminent. The rogue states too, which directly and indirectly support terrorists, are themselves deeply enmeshed in this web of imminence. On a scale of a continuum of threats, what is imminent? What can happen in one day, in one week, in one month, in one year, to paraphrase the Secretary of Defence, Donald Rumsfeld? It is this hard question, that the critics of the war are avoiding from answering, as a result of their intellectual flabbiness and lack of moral and political integrity.

Statesmen who face a great portentous danger, as presently posed by an 'emerging nexus between terrorist networks, terrorist states, and weapons of mass destruction', to quote Secretary Rumsfeld, will not await for the elusive perfect intelligence, perfect information, before they take decisive and unrelenting action against a formidable and deadly foe. In the realm of human affairs uncertainty is the absolute sovereign. It is in this context of uncertainty that political leaders, prudently and intrepidly, but not foolhardily, have to make their determining and momentous decisions.

In the case of the war against Iraq, the Bush and Blair governments had to decide on the sort of action they would take on the basis (a) of the information they had received from their intelligence agencies, whose assessments were based on the calculus of probability, not on certainty (the latter being unattainable) that Iraq possessed WMD, and had plans in place to develop nuclear weapons, and that Hussein would not be squeamish in using them, either directly against his enemies, as he had done in his war against Iran and on his own people, or through proxies, i.e., terrorists. And (b) on Hussein's demonstration of his geopolitical ambitions for the region and the ruthless means he would use to achieve them, and the links he had with global terror.

No wise and responsible political leadership, in such critical conditions, would tarry its crucial decisions, until the interminable debates of the experts, as to whether, in the present case, the aluminium tubes were for uranium enrichment or for rocket construction,- and if they were to be used for rockets, the latter could be carrying WMD - had reached majority or unanimous agreement as to their use. ( Even such an agreement could never be foolproof and could only be tested in the real conditions to which it would be applicable. Moreover, as experts in intelligence can make mistakes in their appraisals, so too experts in other fields are not immune from making mistakes.)

This is the resounding truth why Bush, Blair, and Howard, decided to go to war in Iraq. And the latter is not only pivotal to the future defeat of global terror ( if one is serious in defeating global terror, one also has to fight its state sponsors. It is a war on two fronts. ), but also, in its strategic goal to prevent the "apocalyptic" coupling of terror and rogue states.

The ominous and deadly challenge of fanatic terrorism\ demands leaders of Gulliverian stature, not Lilliputians. The imposing lesson of history is, that in hard times, such as our own, it is the "hard men" that prevail. The flaccid and indecisive leaders, who wait for the will-o'-the-wisp of perfect intelligence and information, before they commit themselves to decisive action, are cast aside and thrown among the debris of history.


The above is an extract from my book titled, Unveiling The War Against Terror written on October 30, 2003

A retort to Dr Peter McMahon's "Global Neo-imperial Fantasies Come Unstuck".

Published On Line Opinion, Australia, 1/11/2005

Con George-Kotzabasis


The utopia builders, a la McMahon, have set up their boutiques in the global market to sell their soddy product. After the collapse of the historically misplaced Communist utopia, with its Gulag Archipelagos and its Killing Fields, the Left's sorcerers apprentices are now concocting their new mantric utopia of "global governance'', to take the place of the displaced one.

Two fundamental contradictions haunt your argument, and ultimately bury the phantoms of the Neo-cons and of neo-imperialism that you raised in your piece. You state that "in the 1970's a new global system was emerging". Your phantoms however, the Neo-cons, were only in power in 2000. By this time the system was already robust and on its course. The Neo-cons were not fabricating a new version of it, as you claim, but were merely its new "managers". And in the aftermath of 9/11, they were also trying to protect it. That was the reason why they went to war, not oil.
The second fundamental flaw in your argument is, that while you claim that "human experiences are too diverse to bend to the logic of one homogeneous society... Or one global market", your panacea for the ills of "global neo-imperialism" is "global-scale governance". At the same time you concede that such "governance"will have "to bend to the logic of...One global market". But how will you put in place such governance upon such "diverse" non-homogeneous societies? Didn't the recent failure of the EU to unite in reference to the amendments of its constitution, which is, moreover, culturally homogeneous, teach you anything?

Your remedy of "global-scale governance", is intellectually unhinged and cannot be taken seriously. All you accomplish with your piece is to replace the "phantoms" of the Neo-cons with your greater phantom of universal governance. By such intellectual credentials, Plato would never allow you to enter his Academy.

UNVEILING THE WAR AGAINST GLOBAL TERROR
Con George-Kotzabasis

A knife was plunged into the back of Western Civilisation on the 11th of September, 2001. The attack of the terrorists on the World Trade Centre and on the Pentagon, was not only an act of war against the United States, but also an attack on Western culture and its institutions, whose pinnacle is cosmopolitan America.

Moreover, it was not an act of emancipation from the imperialist yoke of the US, as some people with a warped cock-eyed historical sense have seen it, but the prelude of a holy war in the name of Islam against the depraved West by a fanatical group of Muslims, who view the US as the embodiment of the West’s evil.

Furthermore, these recruits of fanaticism, as the hijackers were, who were prepared to sacrifice their lives, were not of the mettle of Japanese kamikaze brave warriors, but cowards who could not perpetrate their ‘heroic’ action without the ‘Koranic’ promise of securing a one-way-ticket to paradise for their martyrdom. They were an inferior disgruntled breed, who having been conscious of the fact that in the race of civilisations they had fallen behind, were full of envy, hate and resentment against the West, which in this historical age has won the race. To illustrate, in a simplified way, that this inability of Muslims to contest other civilisations and win, is deeply rooted in their religion, is exemplified by the commandment of the Koran that its believers should pray five times a day. Imagine a marathon race that lasted all day, whose protagonists were of a mixed religious background, and the position of those who would have to stop and pray five times, at the finish of the race.
No wonder, that the verdict of history can be so harsh on cultures whose people spend so much time in the affairs of the "Other" world than in the affairs of the present one. And no wonder, that by the criteria of economic social and political development, countries with such religious rigidity are falling behind countries of the developed world. It is not surprising therefore, that people who are trapped in such religious conformity, will seek and find scapegoats for their own and for their governments’ failings. This is especially so among the educated and demographically increasing younger generations, whose resentment is intensified even more against the West, because their societies cannot provide them with employment, due to the fact that their elitist and authoritarian regimes spend their incomes on conspicuous consumption, on internecine wars, and on overseas investments in the economically developed countries of the world, instead of investing their capital in the industrial infrastructure of their own countries. For all these deficiencies of their own regimes they blame the Americans. The young therefore, become terrorist fodder in the hands of their fundamentalist leaders, such as Osama bin Laden, because all their ambitions and talents cannot find an outlet within the corrupt regimes of their own countries.

What, however, is most disturbing for the West, is that the distorted interpretations of the Koran by the fundamentalist mullahs, motivate a sizeable part of the young to throng behind their fanatic leaders’ calls for a Jihad, in almost all Muslim countries, as well as some Muslims of the diaspora who reside in the West. For if the will of Allah allows killers of innocent people to enter the kingdom of God, then killing of the innocent would be an act of salvation and guarantee for their mass murderers that they would enter infinite paradise. If there are, as it is obvious, some Muslims who cannot see through these distorted interpretations of the Koran, then Western nations have no other option but to respond to the battle-cry of their leaders, and fight them to the end. No civilised human rights laws should protect this murderous mass of fanatics who are determined to bury civilised life. No United Nations human rights shield should protect these terrorists, as well as those who harbour and promote them. When the heart of Western civilisation is the target of these extremists, then the top priority for the west should be their elimination. The only maxim that should apply to terrorist criminals, is that those who live by the laws of the jungle should also be prepared to die by the laws of the jungle. But this is a maxim of the brave. ….

It would be foolish after the ruins of New York to search for soft options. It is for this reason that the humanitarian calls, of well intentioned people -and of the not so well intentioned potpourri of socialists, anarchists, and their fellow-travellers- for peace in conditions of a ruthless war launched by these fanatics against the West, lack historical knowledge and are bereft of reason. To assert, as these groups do, that the terrorist attack in New York and Washington, is the comeuppance of the US for its policies in the Middle East and of its bombing and embargo against Iraq, is to show the ingrained bias and hatred these groups have against the US, as well as display their shallow historical analysis of events of the last fifty-five years. Such assertions are no more than political and historical alchemy, and should be treated with the appropriate intellectual contempt they deserve.

According to article 51 of the UN Charter, in regards to an armed attack against a nation, the US has every right to defend itself against this attack of the terrorists on its soil. Moreover, it has a moral and strategic responsibility to respond to this dastardly strike against civilians with its full might, especially, when this strike is merely the beginning of what is to come, if these fanatics of al Qaeda and other extremists groups happen to obtain biological and nuclear weapons, which they would use with a zealot’s glee against the infidels of the West. Against this apocalyptic threat that confronts the West, the latter has to act with all its power, pre-emptively, fearlessly, and decisively.


The first signs are, that this ‘war’ against terrorism will be unlike any other wars. The battlelines will be three-dimensional. They will involve ‘blitzkriegs’ on the economic, diplomatic and military terrain. But in the diplomatic field it will be the end of diplomacy as we know it. The United States will play hard ball diplomacy on an international scale, and its “mission will determine its coalition”, in the words of its Defence Secretary Rumsfeld. Its foreign policy will be prudently flexible, but it will not allow itself to be beguiled and misguided by the siren songs of that tower of Babel, the United Nations, to open another welter and ‘banter’ on the table of negotiations.There cannot be a crossing, a meeting of minds, with such ruthless, fanatical opponents. The scourge of terrorism will not and cannot be resolved on the table of prolonged negotiations, but on the battlefield, especially when the time-bomb of biological and nuclear devices is ticking-on.The US military retaliation must be massive and swift. The times are not for timorous leaders, military sceptics, and indecisive Hamlets. President Bush, having an intelligent, decisive administration, shows all the signs that he will tackle this problem, unlike his predecessor, complacent, Hamletinesque Clinton, by grappling the bull of terrorism by its horns. But, he will not be a reckless matador. This is illustrated by the fact, that despite the carnage of New York and Washington and the immense provocation – it was the first time in its history that the US mainland had become a target - this attack was on the Bush Administration, yet the latter did not respond with a knee-jerk reaction, but with prudence, stoicism, and deliberation. It took almost a month before it responded militarily against this challenge of the terrorists. And before it started firing its missiles on Afghanistan, it forged a notable coalition, encompassing Europe and Asia, of which China and Russia are the most important, against terrorism, as a necessary, if not indispensable weapon in its fight against these fanatics.

In his address to the nation, President Bush made it clear, that the war on terrorism will be unconventional, protracted, and not without casualties. It will not be a war fought by divisions and army corps. It will be fought in the shadows of intelligence, since its enemy has a shadowy existence, and by special forces, whose aim will be to take out terrorist bases, and either capture or eliminate its core personnel and its leaders. To borrow and example from the animal world, it will be a war of the hawks against the hedgehogs. The only difference being, that the hawks will not only operate on the ground, but also underground, ferreting out the terrorists from their burrows. The special forces will sweep from the sky, and as soon as they accomplish their mission, they will disappear into the sky again. No time for their enemies to pin them down. The element of surprise will be a great military advantage, and will play a decisive role, psychologically and physically in beating the terrorists.


Also, military strategists should consider the stretching of the unconventionality of the war more widely, by employing and deploying mercenaries against terrorists. There is a vast international pool of veterans highly skilled in the art of combat and clandestine warfare, who would be willing to use their prowess against terrorism. It would be most imprudent for Western governments not to tap this pool of international condottieri and bring it into its war mechanism against terror, because of moral scruples. In crisis conditions, all morality is answerable to the circumstances of the situation, not to ‘god’. No moral norm can be unconditional. Hence, the recruitment of mercenaries is neither immoral nor unconscionable, if it is going to contribute towards the defeat of terror.

The war against the Taliban and bin Laden must be fought with all the US armaments, excluding biological and nuclear weapons. The teary comments of parts of the media on civilian casualties, have a misplaced perspective, and weaken the support that the coalition must have among its people to defeat this mortal enemy. No modern warfare can occur without civilian casualties, especially in the case of these fanatics who often use civilians as a shield.


The fact is however, that more civilians are killed by these dictatorial regimes than are killed when these regimes are struck from outside. Saddam Hussein massacred more civilians than the US bombing during the Gulf War. The Taliban and the Northern Alliance have slaughtered more civilians in their fratricidal war against each other, than the US bombing will ever do. In Rwanda, the Hutu regime massacred 800,000 Tutsi civilians in its tribal war against the latter. Where are the tears of the media for the above historical facts? To accuse the US, that it deliberately targets civilians, is a gross fabrication and distortion of the truth. If its war planners had such an unjust and feeble-minded policy which targeted civilians, then such a policy would jeopardise its moral standing against terrorists, as well as lose in one sweep the support it has from the coalition, that it so wisely and diligently has put in place.

The US has to retaliate with all its might against this global threat of terrorism. It should give no intellectual quarter to the sceptics and pessimists of academia, who claim that the war against terrorism cannot be won. Professor Fred Halliday, in an article published in The Weekly Guardian on October 27, claims that “eradicating terrorists does not eradicate their cause”. And a war against terrorism is “war against an enemy.of whom action can have no predictable end”. The most effective way to eradicate their cause is to put an end to the perceived invincibility and successes of the terrorists. Even fanatics, once they are deprived of their ‘invincibility’ by being defeated decisively in their operations, will lose their confidence that God is with them, and will abandon their cause. As to the second contention of Professor Halliday, one can only reply that action against an enemy can never have a predictable end. But because of the unpredictability of war, one does not reel from fighting a mortal enemy who is threatening one’s survival. No one among the North Vietnamese leadership, could predict or even conceive that they could win the war against the United States, but unimaginative, intellectually nipple-fed professors, are always predictable.


The war in Afghanistan against the Taliban and al Qaeda, will not be difficult to be won by the Americans. The defeat of the Soviets by the mujihadeen as an example of what would happen to the Americans, is inappropriate. The mujihadeen won the war against the Russians, not because of their formidableness as fighters, but mainly because of the material, logistical support and military advise the US had given it. In this ‘war’ the Taliban is totally isolated, and is not a beneficiary of strategic support and advice. The only support it has, is the support of fanaticism. And while fanaticism might induce courage, it depletes intelligence. But it is by intelligence that wars are won. Wayward, blind courage does not win wars. In modern warfare when one’s opponent is resolute, as the Americans are in this conflict, ‘robots’ which are motivated by fanaticism are destined to finish in a scrap heap of metal.The defeat of the Taliban and al Qaeda in Afghanistan, will ease the defeat of all other terrorist networks that exist in other countries. The West cannot rest until this infamy of global terrorism is crushed.


This paper was written on October 15, 2001, and published in the English supplement of ‘Neos Kosmos’, in November 19, 2001

REALIST FOREIGN POLICY: US ISOLATIONISM CURE AGAINST TERROR

George Kotzabasis



Chuck Pena, a realist in foreign policy argues, in his piece in the Washington Note, June 16, 06, as a result of the “debacle” of the US invasion of Iraq, ‘that US interventionism is a root cause of anti-American resentment in the Muslim world-which breeds hatred and becomes a stepping stone to violence, including terrorism.’ He suggests, therefore, that the US ‘stop meddling in the internal affairs of countries…except when they directly threaten US national security interests’, lessen its involvement in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and cease supporting authoritarian regimes, such as the Saudi Arabian and that of Egypt. He strongly believes, that such a new course in America’s foreign policy can ‘cure the disease’ of terror. Hence, the withdrawal of the US from the hotspots of the world, such as the Middle East, is the prudent course to take and avoid, according to him, the disastrous intervention in Iraq from happening again.

This is no less than a new version of the US isolationism of the past. And this is isolationism with a vengeance. As such a policy will be taken by the only superpower in the world. And historically will be unprecedented. As no great, powerful nation in the past withdrew from the turbulent spots in the world, for the purpose of avoiding the resentment of those nations that were the fomenters of this turbulence, especially when the latter threatened the order upon which its power rested. Such a policy is completely unrealistic, especially when it’s recommended to be adopted by the sole superpower, which is the major force that keeps the world’s order, and deals a severe blow to the realist credentials of Chuck Pena.

But it’s obvious that pessimism is the paternity of this new version of isolationism. In the face of US casualties and reverses in Iraq, in the aftermath of its victory against the Saddam regime, some foreign policy realists have lost their grip on history as well as their strength to stand firm against these reverses. In all human enterprises mistakes and reverses are part of the process, and this is especially so in war. To believe that one can engage in warfare without committing errors and without the risk of suffering reverses is the belief of armchair strategists who presumably can plan their wars with the precision of Laplace’s demon leaving nothing to chance. Alas, such absolute knowledge that can foresee every reaction of an enemy to one’s action and hence plan victory against an enemy with algorithmic precision, has not been bequeathed by providence to man. But despite this weakness of man, some people have been endowed by nature to be strong in the face of all errors and reverses and to have the ability to turn them around. This is the endowment of great commanders, and this is the difficult task they have in the Iraqi war today. To cut and run, as a result of these tactical reverses that the Americans are going through, would be the greatest error that would surpass all other errors, as well as being a stupendous strategic reversal, of the US war against global terror.

Wars cannot be waged nor can they be won with pessimists a la Chuck Pena. It’s the vocation of optimists to win wars. And there are auspicious signs--beyond the dramatic selectivity of most of the media to pick the most gruesome events in Iraq, i.e., the daily terrorist killings of civilians and the frequent killings of US troops which are the two aspects of the war that have maximum impact upon the public--that with the formation of a government of national unity, the strengthening of its security forces, the amnesty announced by Prime Minister al Maliki, and the elimination of the leader of al Qaeda in Iraq, Zarqawi, that the insurgents will become not only more isolated from, but also more hated than feared by, the Iraqi people. This will lead to the demoralization of the insurgents and the loss of their élan to continue fighting.

Moreover, and this is the most important feature of the insurgency, the fact that the main target of the insurgents are not their counter-combatants but civilians, exposes their military weakness, their increasing inability to kill, the by now, better trained Iraqi security forces, in armed combat. And the narrowing of the sieve, through which car bombs can penetrate into populated areas, will further disable the insurgents to continue to commit their atrocious attacks against civilians.

In the chronicle of insurgencies, no insurgency that was unable to fight its enemy in battle and resorted only in targeting and killing civilians was successful in destabilizing and eventually overthrowing the established regime. This fighting inability of the Iraqi insurgency is accentuated further, by having to confront the prowess of the occupying forces. And although it can inflict more than moderate casualties upon the occupying power and upon Iraqi security forces by the stealthily moving car bombs and laying road bombs, it cannot win the war by stealth. Furthermore, its increasing isolation from the people will deprive it of any logistical support that is getting from the latter, as well as the cover behind which it can hide. Hence, the insurgents will become cherry picking targets of the American-led forces.

In such militarily disadvantageous milieu the insurgents cannot survive for long. It’s this optimistic scenario that is unfolding from ‘the fog of war’ in Iraq, that the pessimists, like Chuck Pena, are unable to see. The Bush administration’s strategy in Iraq, and more generally for the region, has a high probability of being successful. And its success will destroy all the unrealistic propositions of the pessimistic realists, that America, the sole superpower, should withdraw from the hotspots of the world and insert itself into a cocoon of neo-isolationism.


The article was written on June 29, 2006

AUSTRALIA MUST PROTECT ITSELF
FROM HOME-GROWN TERROR

George Kotzabasis

The anti-terror laws proposed by the Howard government, have brought in their wake the civil libertarians' nightmares - that these laws will destroy civil liberties, freedom of speech and assembly, and eventually and irreparably erode the values of our democratic state. The nightmarish shadow of ASIO and its spooks will forebodingly spread and pervade all parts of our society, and no institution or person will be safe from the horrid intrusions of its ghostly agents. Hence, according to the libertarians' 'apparitional' thinking, the offspring of these laws will be a police state.

But how real are these ugly images -read as concerns of the civil libertarians -beyond the tarot cards of their predictions, and what is the probability that they could change the democratic fabric of our society so drastically resulting in people losing their civil liberties? It's in the adversarial response of the critics to these proposed anti-terror laws, that the answer to the above question lies.

The point d'appui upon which the critics of these laws rest their case is fear. But a one-sided fear - the fear that these laws will deprive us of our freedoms - that totally disregards the other greater fear posed by the terrorists, which will deprive us of our lives. Thus, the libertarians' protection of freedom is the protection of the freedom of the dead.

Let us however be more gentle with their claims, and attempt to examine them historically and rationally as they stand. They claim that the anti-terror laws will be implemented in an unfettered and shadowy way - without oversight or legal scrutiny by parliament or any other relevant authority - by ASIO and other security agencies against suspect terrorists and without the latter having recourse to the normal judicial processes that are part and parcel of a just state. They also claim, that these laws "can be used to deal with a range of issues beyond terrorism" and hence open the backdoor to a police state. Furthermore, they are unprecedented in their sweep, such as "preventative detention of suspects"... stripping them of their citizenship and deporting them, "legal powers akin to wartime than peacetime". John North, the President of the Law Council says that "these laws may bring us in danger of capitulating to terrorists, because they would have achieved their objective". Maybe we should capitulate to weakness and not pass these laws and hence get bombed, which is the ultimate objective of the terrorists. This seems to be less of a danger to Mr. North. And they assert that there is no certainty that these laws will be effective in preventing a terrorist attack in Australia.

(The quotes above are from Cameron Stewart, The Australian, 17 September 2005.)

This is no more than an ardent attempt by the civil libertarians to demolish the rationale and fectiveness of these laws by employing, as above, subterfuge, legal and philosophical abstractions and scarecrows to make their case. They are unwilling to use concrete historical evidence to make their argument (maybe because such evidence would have been detrimental to their claims) or reason, since the premise of their position is founded on the emotion of fear.

IN TIMES OF WAR LAWS MUST CHANGE

All democratic nations in times of war in the past had to pass legislation that enforced censorship and the detention of suspects propagating and promoting seditious action. And the laws issuing from such legislation had to be applied rigorously against any suspects who could organise themselves into a fifth column within a country at war. But the historically conclusive evidence is that in democratic societies as soon as the war ended, these laws ceased to apply and once again society returned to its former normal state. Undoubtedly, during the application of these laws, mistakes and indeed, abuses were made and some individuals apprehended or incarcerated were entirely innocent. But the scale of the operation and application of these injunctions were so great that it would have been impossible to execute them without making in some cases mistakes and errors of judgment. No human action on any gigantic scale, as for example in war, can ever be error-free. To expect that one could achieve one's goals on such a wide range without human fallibility playing an acting role, both in the mental and moral spheres, is to expect a play about the 'Fall of Man' without any human actors, but only angelic ones, in it.

The human condition is a state of irremediable imperfection. But despite this grim fact, the evolution of human nature has not stopped at its amoebic stage. In the irreversible Darwinian process of the survival of the fittest, the human species had to continuously develop new and more perfect means for its survival. Although these means were far from perfect in a divine sense, they were good enough for its earthly existence. The anti-terrorist laws are in this category of 'good enough'.

Australia, being at war, has no other option but to take these less than perfect hard measures that have a high probability of protecting its citizens from a home-grown terrorist attack. However, the premise upon which any wise legislation or enactment of laws rest, is that these laws must be commensurate to the threat (s) that emanates from illegal action. For example, if there is a spate of housebreaking, parliament has to legislate the appropriate, but not too-harsh laws that could deter this criminal activity from occurring - by jailing the culprits for a short time. If on the other hand, like New York few years ago, when a spate of robberies and murders were occurring which posed a greater threat to the residents of a city than housebreaking, the government would have to pass harsher laws, if it seriously wanted to prevent these 'deadly muggings' from happening, such as those with the 'zero tolerance' passed by the former mayor of New York, Guiliani. Furthermore, because of haphazardness and uncertainty, which is the shadow of all human action, one can never be sure that any laws passed will be completely effective in deterring people from engaging in illegal activities. Nonetheless, despite this ineradicable element of chance that is implanted in all laws, no government can eschew or excuse itself from the responsibility of taking the appropriate punitive measures that have a high probability of being successful against criminal conduct. (A clear example of this were the zero tolerance laws that were enforced in New York. At the time there was a volcanic eruption of protests from civil libertarians that these laws were inhumane, unjust, and ignoble, and that they would be totally ineffective as a deterrent to crime. Their success however, in substantially diminishing crime within a short time, proved its critics to be totally wrong.)

This indeterminacy and unpredictability of all human laws, unlike the physical laws of gravity, in regards to their success against lawbreakers, is moreover augmented, to the highest degree when a government has to legislate laws against a 'consortium' of religious fanatics whose mode of operation has the speed and randomness of quicksilver and whose goal is the destruction of civilised society by the barbaric and ruthless use of weapons of mass destruction, including nuclear ones, against it. The legislators of these laws that could forestall such lethal terrorist attacks must be aware that all such attacks in the eyes of these fanatics are 'pushed' by the breath of Allah. Hence, the most impossible action(s) fantastically imagined, in the context of such apocalyptic fanaticism, becomes an alarming reality. Muslim fanatic terrorism, has no rational concrete political or social goals, despite its propagandistic pronouncements to the contrary, which are merely a fig-leaf of their real intentions, but only the eschatological goal of destroying decadent Western civilisation. In such circumstances, laws that could be effective against criminal activity would be totally ineffective against zealots who are guided solely by the laws of God. Hence, one of the most fundamental elements of law, the deterring factor, is completely useless against these fanatics. And this is the reason why the government has to legislate a new generation of laws that would have a chance to be effective against "god's outlaws".

In the passing of such legislation however, one has to make a distinction between hardcore terrorists and would-be terrorists. The latter have not reached the point of no return of the fanatics. And either because of fear of what would happen to themselves or to their families, they could be constrained by laws, from entering the gates of hell of active terrorism. This is why the anti-terror laws must be composed of both a 'safe-haven' and a 'purgatory': a safe-haven for those Muslim fundamentalists that can be promptly rehabilitated, and a purgatory for those inveterate and pathological fanatics, whose 'rehabilitation' can only be accomplished, if ever, inside the gates of Infinite Paradise.

To the raw suspect recruits of would-be terrorists, the applied laws must have provisions that they are not going to be treated too harshly, thus leaving them an opening, a safe-haven, to rescue themselves from the relentless squeeze of the vice of the law that would apply to the hardcore fanatics, either as suspects of being active terrorists or as suspects who propagate and incite terrorism - as some of the fundamentalist imams and teachers in Islamic schools do among their followers. To these imams and mentors who actively or by intent engage in seditious activities and the incitement of a holy war against ourselves and our allies, who are also waging war on global terror, the purgatory of deportation, detention, and imprisonment should remorselessly apply. This is where the deterring factor of the law lies against these votaries of fanaticism -in the concrete rigorous harsh application of the laws against them and not in their abstract state as a threat.

This clear distinction of how to deal with the hardcore fanatics in contrast to their greenhorn recruits, has the great potential to sever the association of the latter from the former, and hence 'dry' the pool from which the fundamentalist mentors of a holy war against the West get their recruits. And by deporting and 'clinking' their perfidious activities the government will effectively disable them from continuing to be the incubators of terror in this country.

The government must not be constrained by any 'legal-niceties' or illusions in the enactment of the anti-terror laws. The latter must correspond to the great threat that external and home-grown terrorism pose to the country. And the curtain has fallen on all discussions, deliberations, and debates about the causes and ideological roots of terrorism. When someone is ready to stab you to death, you don't restrain his action by parleying with him about the causes that made him an assassin. This is the time for action. The government must take no heed of the animadversions and subterfuges of the civil libertarians. All their assertions are no more than a marivaudage, a sophisticated banter, about this grave and deadly serious issue. In its enactment of these anti-terror laws, it must be solely governed by its historical duty to ordain this imperative legislation to protect Australia.

Article was written on September 23, 2005

THE LEADER OF THE OPPOSITION REPLACES THE
AUSTRALIAN FLAG WITH HIS “WET PANTS”

George Kotzabasis

The leader of the Opposition Kim Beazley, after reading selectively the US National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) report that the war in Iraq had become a cause celebre for Jihadists, announced that if he would become Prime Minister he would withdraw the troops from Iraq. Such announcement does not, as Foreign Minister Downer hinted, replace the Australian flag with the white flag it replaces the Australian flag with Beazley’s “wet pants”.

The unclassified report of the NIE that was released by the Bush administration has more positives than negatives for the Administration. As Michael Costello, a former advisor to Beazley, argues in his piece in The Australian on September 29, 06, the report supports Bush’s policy of establishing democracy in the Middle East as well as his determination not to withdraw US troops from Iraq prematurely. The NIE states clearly that ‘should Jihadists leaving Iraq perceive themselves, and be perceived to have failed, we judge fewer fighters will be inspired to carry on the fight.’ And the report continues, that ‘perceived jihad success in Iraq would inspire more fighters to continue the fight elsewhere’. Hence, the defeat of the insurgents in Iraq and the establishment of nascent democracy in the country are pivotal to the defeat of terrorists in other regions including our own.

Beazley’s withdrawal of our troops from Iraq would therefore invigorate and exacerbate the threat of terror in our region. And with two hundred and thirty millions Muslims as neighbors and the strengthening of Jemal Islamiyah within Indonesia, Australia would face a massively stupendous enemy in our region. It would also increase the internal threat rising from the enemy within, whose fanaticism will induce many of its recruits to become holy warriors against the infidel Australians. Hence Beazley’s policy of withdrawal from Iraq would increase by an astronomical order the danger to Australia, especially when soon the Jihadists might be armed with weapons of mass destruction, if not with portable nuclear weapons. Moreover, our troops fighting an invisible more confident and tougher enemy in our region will bear enormous casualties in the hundreds, if not in thousands, and the war budget will reach unheard of heights without end in sight. And once again Australia will require its ally America, whom a Beazley government had abandoned in Iraq, to extricate it from an endless war that Australia cannot win without the military support and deployment of US forces. All this will happen by the courtesy of the thin emaciated will, spirit, and imagination of Beazley.

But will the public buy the shoddy, deficient strategic nous of this wet merchant of politics, Kim Beazley, at the next federal elections that will place Australia in this engulfing peril?

A CURSE IS HAUNTING THE LEADERS OF EUROPE

George Kotzabasis

A revisiting curse is haunting the ruling elites of “old” Europe, the curse of Munich. The three witches of Macbeth have taken leave of their domicile on the Scottish highlands, to settle on the banks of the foggy politically putrid vapors of the Seine, the Neva and the Rhine, to brew their curse while singing in unison their ditty, "weakness is strength and strength is weakness". It’s this same ditty, that the diplomatic emissaries of the accursed triumvirate of Chirac, Putin, and Schroeder - the latter being now replaced by Angela Merkel who apparently would like to take a sturdier pro-American stand but she is politically constrained in doing so - will be singing too in the international forums that are attempting to deal with the critical situation that is unfolding in Iran. Tragically, however, the repetition of the disastrous policy of the Munich appeasement, which John Maynard Keynes called “unheroic cunctation”, in our century, is not going to be repeated the second time around as “farce”, as Marx presaged, but even as a greater tragedy than the trail of events that followed the appeasement of 1938. Alas, this is the “apocalyptic” threat that is posed against the West by Iran’s future acquisition of nuclear weapons, whose unappeasable fanatic president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, in his pursuit to “wipe Israel off the map”, and to destroy even, Khomeini’s “Great Satan”, America, as a holy warrior would deploy with paradisiacal bliss against the infidels of the West. Especially, when he has made it translucently clear that he wants “to bring the reappearance of Imam Mahdi, the Messiah, who would herald the Last Judgment and the end of the world”, to quote Dr.Leanne Piggott, from the University of NSW. Moreover, the Islamic Jihadist “alliance” of Iran with a sundry of suicidal terrorist fanatics who operate on a global scale enhances this threat at an exponential rate and makes it even more ominously real.

How Western nations, especially the United States, will respond to this perilous threat emanating from the uncompromising fanatical stand of Iran’s president, is the most crucial issue of our times. There is no room for optimism that Iran’s “unbalanced act”, under its present leadership, will fall into the “net of diplomacy”. Especially, when its leadership is witnessing the lack of unity and discord that exists among some major Western nations, as well as with that powerful “outsider” China, as to the best way to frustrate and stop Iran’s nuclear ambitions. Its leaders therefore make the safe wager that these nations will be unable to consolidate a strong unshakable unity that would prevent Iran from entering the nuclear club. Thus the religious fanatic Ahmadinejad, is taking lessons from the most secular of modern dictators while the leaders of old Europe shut their eyes before these lessons. If the transmigration of souls, according to ancient belief, could bring back Hitler’s soul, this time embodied in the form of a lecturer giving seminars on topics of brinkmanship, political bluff and deception, in which he excelled, among his audience one would notice the peculiar absence of Europeans, with one exception, and the presence of a few Americans from a rare breed, considering their strong isolationist heritage, but not from the blue ribbon states. However, one could not miss the conspicuous presence of a swarthy southern Asian, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad himself, who being keen to learn the arts of diplomatic mendacity, dissembling, and cozenage, from a master virtuoso - who was able to “transfix” the Prime minister of a great country, Britain, in a state of irremediable illusions that played such a tragic part in not preventing the great catastrophe that would befall upon the world ­– was absorbing in a state of trance the imperative lessons that the transmigrated soul of Hitler was exuding. Thus it was, that the present leaders of old Europe, whose peoples in the recent past had suffered death and destruction on an immense scale, as a result of incomprehensible and unforgivable errors of judgment, a welter of unimaginable illusions, and a cowardly lack of resolve, by their political predecessors, are doltishly unable to comprehend the lessons of that tragic era. And deliberately are closing their eyes to the diplomatic debacles an ensemble arriviste European politicians had suffered in the hands of Hitler. Thus, Talleyrand’s touché about the Bourbons, “that they have learnt nothing and forgotten nothing”, completely applies to the present parvenu leaders of old Europe.

NO PARALLEL BETWEEN AHMADINEJAD AND HITLER?

But to respond in advance to those who argue that there is no parallel and no similarity between Hitler’s Germany and Ahmadinejad’s Iran, either in industrial-military power or in ideology (after all Ahmadinejad has not written his Mein Kampf), is to be purblind to the reality that in a war of a clash of civilizations between Islamofascism and Western freedom, the former as an aggressor does not have to be the equal in overall industrial or military might over his enemies, but only to be relatively “equal” in the ultimate destructive weapon. And his strength from the fanatic resolve that emanates from a fundamentalist interpretation of the Koran, which is the godly substitute of Mein Kampf, makes his ideology even more dangerous than the one of the Nazis. Moreover, Iran would possess an enormous strategic advantage over its infidel enemies by having at its disposal numerous suicidal fanatic terrorists, both from Muslim countries and those residing in the West, as fifth-columnists, whom once it had supplied with weapons of mass destruction, and indeed, with portable nuclear weapons, would deploy them lethally against the West.

The contention that the possession of nuclear weapons by Iran would not pose a threat to the West as the former would follow, like the Soviet Union, the logic of deterrence, the doctrine of mutual assured destruction, is completely wrong as it totally disregards the fundamental difference that propelled the geopolitical ambitions of The Soviet Union and those that propel Iran’s. The former, despite the rhetoric of its uncompromising ideology, from its inception always encompassed in its policies Western rationale and realpolitik, from Lenin’s NEP, New Economic Policy, to Stalin’s alliance with Hitler, which was epitomized by Stalin’s question, “how many divisions does the pope have?” Such a stand by the Soviets was hardly surprising, since the father of its ideology Karl Marx was profoundly steeped in the culture of Western civilization, not to mention the fact that Russia itself after Peter the great was part of that civilization. Also, a more recent example of realpolitik by the Russians was Krutchev’s “blinking” before Kennedy’s naval blockade of Cuba, and the threat this confrontation between the two superpowers portended for mankind.

Contrariwise, the Iranians under the fanatic leadership of Ahmadinejad, whose goal is to bring the City Of God on earth, rationality is overtly absent from its policies of aggression. Especially when it perceives that its enemies sui generis are morally and politically weak and would not be willing to jeopardize the comforts and luxuries that flow from an “unruffled” economic development by taking a stand of belligerence against it that would imperil their comfortable lives. An illustration of such a misconceived perception was first the belief of Osama bin Laden that he could directly attack the US without the latter retaliating against him and the Taliban with all the might of its military force. And secondly, Sadam Hussein’s belief, that by manipulating the peaceful propensities of the major European countries, of France, Germany, and Russia - since they were lavishly feeding themselves off from the trough of corruption that Saddam had provided for their insatiable greed, through the oil-for-food programme, they were careful not to “destabilize” this sumptuous trough - he would be able to check the Americans from attacking him. In both these cases it was the “irrational exuberance”, to use a term of the former Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan, of bin Laden and Saddam that brought their destruction. And it’s the same irrationality that enshrouds in its black veil Iran’s fanatic leadership. Indeed, president Ahmadinejad’s irrationality is even more deep-seated in view of his denial about the holocaust and his statement of “wiping Israel off the map”. It will also be much more dangerous if this irrationality is going to be armed with nuclear weapons, as it would threaten a great part of the world with annihilation including of course Iran.

To expect that deterrence would prevent such destruction from occurring is a wish of the will-o’-the-wisp. The concept of deterrence, in geopolitical terms, has its deep roots in rationality and can only affect and impact rational actors. It would be a great illusion to expect leaders, such as Ahmadinejad, who are ardent believers in final Last Judgment ideologies and whose only “rational” communication is with the “heavenly” clouds, would be prone to involve themselves in a rational discourse. This would be especially so, if they sense that their foes are disunited and weak and see themselves holding the upper hand. Indeed, the debility of its enemies in the minds of these fanatics, reassures them that the implacable and uncompromising hard stand against their foes has the imprimatur of their God. Moreover, the acquisition of nuclear weapons by Iran and its jumping over all the diplomatic hurdles that so foolishly an impotent leadership of the West placed as a substitute for its lack of decisive action that would have prevented such acquisition, would make Ahmadinejad not only a hero, of almost a Saladinesque stature, among Iranians, but among all the Muslims of the world. Such a great political, diplomatic, and strategic victory over the pre-eminent powers of the West by Ahmadenijad would confer upon him such a political aura that would vouchsafe his presidency in perpetuity. Hence, all the blissful hopes of the West that a robust political opposition could oust the mullahs and Ahmadinejad from the helm of power would prove to be a mirage.

"KISS OF DEATH" DIPLOMACY

So there are two paramount questions that Western nations must answer. What kind of strategy, and which nation or nations could implement such a strategy that would effectively crash the insatiable desire of Iran’s leaders to acquire nuclear weapons? To answer the second question first, the only nation that irrefragably could implement such a strategy successfully is the United States. Supported by a number of nations and their peoples from Europe and Asia that would exclude however Spain, France, Russia, and possibly even Germany under its new government, since the solid support of an American strategy by the latter nations would be highly improbable. The reason being that these nations as lesser powers but with visions of grandeur-with the exclusion of Spain-view the US with envy if not with animosity. Moreover, in a world where the US is the sole hyper-power and these nations are not militarily threatened by another super-power, as they were during the Cold War, they consider themselves to have enough elbow room in the international arena to achieve their differentiated geopolitical interests without endorsing, and in opposition to, US interests. Another politically insurmountable problem is, particularly for France and Germany and some other south-western European nations, even if a new leadership arose within a short time among the latter with a desire to take a pro-American stand, this leadership would still be politically hoisted on their nations own petard - as Greece and more lately Germany have shown - as their peoples contaminated with the virus of anti-Americanism, that was so virulently propagated by their former political leaders and cultural elites, would frustrate such a desire. It’s for these important reasons therefore, that it would be a stupendous folly of any Administration of the US to believe that its strategy against Iran would be endorsed or supported by the above countries. However, this reasoning does not apply to nations with modicum means of power, as exemplified by many eastern European nations liberated from the Soviet Union’s bondage, as well as of nations which were forced to be parts of the USSR, and whose peoples overwhelmingly tend to have amicable feelings toward the United States. Furthermore, they realize that by being allies of America, the latter can protect their interests from the pressures and incursions of their more powerful neighbors, such as Russia and Germany. It’s no surprise therefore that some of the Eastern European countries, such as Poland, are deploying their troops in Iraq alongside the Americans.

The corollary of the above problematic, i.e., the lack of a diplomatic consensus between the US and the major nations of Europe and China, is that conventional diplomacy in this confrontation between the intransigent leadership of Iran and the leaderships of the US and the EU, cannot play a crucial role in stopping Iran from accumulating nuclear weapons. Hence, the US will be compelled tragically to use the cruel and violent means of war against Iran if it’s seriously concerned that Ahmadinejad armed with nuclear weapons will be a real and a deadly threat to Western civilization. But while “consensus diplomacy” will be absent, diplomacy will not cease, as it will be replaced by the “soloist” hyperactive and bellicose diplomacy of the Americans. While the date of the latter’s military attack against Iran will not be identified, the reality of such an attack will be forcefully announced by the US government, so that it will leave no doubt about its consummation in the hearing of the Iran leadership. However, before such an attack occurs, this “armed diplomacy” of the US will make quite clear to the Ahmadinejad regime that it will not only be targeting its nuclear plants, but, also, its political, religious, and military leadership aiming at its elimination. This “kiss of death” diplomacy forcefully pressed on the foreheads of this triangular leadership of Iran has a great potential of sowing the seeds of division in its ranks with the result of ousting the radicals of Ahmadinejad and replace them with moderates, who would be keen to accept the injunctions of this armed diplomacy.

Thus, a “palace revolt” against the theocratic regime could be instigated by means of diplomacy. And usher regime change in the most peaceful way. Of course, such diplomacy will not attract the support of the “ballet tip-toeing” nations of Europe. But this will not be an obstacle to the resolute leadership of the Bush administration. And the latter will obtain the backing of the coalition of the willing, which will be adequate on this high stakes issue. The probability of achieving this peaceful transformation of regime change is far from being a long shot. But if uncertainty, that rules in the affairs of mankind and beyond, uncannily plays its mischievous role and negates this probability, then there will be no other option for the Bush administration but to adhere to its “original principle of pre-emption”, to quote the British historian Niall Ferguson. The US will have no other option but to attack both Iran’s nuclear plants and its three-tier leadership.

It’s a terrible and tragic burden for any president to carry on his shoulders. But this is the price that statesmanship must pay in this most dangerous of times. Emanating from the coupling of terrorists and rogue theocratic states armed with nuclear weapons.

The article was written on March 10, 2006

US UNILATERALISM ONLY ALTERNATIVE
TO MULTILATERAL WEAKNESS

George Kotzabasis


A virus is threatening to enter and contaminate the bloodstream of a large part of the Australian people, the virus of moral desertion. Desertion of major and important allies in their hour of need, and desertion of Australia’s long-term interests, as these allies could be crucial, as they have been in the past, for the nation’s survival and its future, in a world where nations cannot easily identify their future enemies in advance.


The fountain of this virus are Messrs. Hayden, Fraser, Whitlam and Hawke, who cravenly, unwisely and un-historically, have taken their “one-night-stand” (of such length will be its intellectual duration), against the possibility of US unilateral action on Iraq, whose development of weapons of mass destruction is obvious to all savvy observers, and whose harboring and supporting of terrorists is just as evident.


The missing star in this constellation of darkness is Paul Keating, who apparently is hedging his bets on the issue, and who with his status as major domo (Placido Domingo?), will not enter the scene until the bit players are “finished off” the stage. Ostensibly, only after that denouement will he reveal his “unilateral” position to his admirers and “encoreists”. And let us wish and hope, that when he enters the act, his stand will be of an intellectually and historically longer duration, than that of the fountainheads, especially of Mr. Whitlam, who prides himself to be a student of Herodotus (the father of history), but who pitifully desecrates the teaching of the great historian indeed. But when Paul Keating does give his strutting performance, don't count on there being more eggs in the basket than "chickens" in the hatchery, on this issue of US unilateralism.


Also presently, there is a congregation of Christian religious prelates rushing towards this fountain, to water, in the heat of their emotional stand against the possibility of an erupting war in Iraq, their intellectually dry palates, threatening a revolt against a possible war tax and civil disobedience, whilst Muslim fundamentalists are slaughtering Christians all over the world, and threatening to kill millions in the future. According to Richard Reid’s evidence,(the captured British Muslim of Arab extraction, the shoe-bomber), presented before the court, after the destruction of the twin towers of the World Trade Center, the second and third plan of the al Qaeda terrorists was to attack the US with biological and nuclear weapons. Could the latter be accomplished without state sponsored terrorism? That is the question!

¨¨¨


USA BULWARK OF DEMOCRACY AND FREEDOM


For more than six decades, the US has been the bulwark of democracy and freedom, and the successful defender against the onslaught of Nazi and Soviet totalitarianism, as well as against Japanese imperialism, which threatened to reverse the world order back to the dark ages. This was especially so of the communist threat, whose ideology not only pervaded and beguiled many nations and peoples of the poor world, but also, many nations and their intellectual luminaries of the affluent West. These luminaries, in many cases, served as teachers to many post-colonial communist rulers, such as Ho Chi Ming, Pol Pot and Chou En Lai in Asia, and Idi Amin, Lumumba and Mugabe in Africa, not to mention others.


Inevitably, during this period, when the world was threatened to become a laboratory of experiments of communist ideology, a “killing fields” of universal dimensions, the US was compelled to make alliances with unsavory and undemocratic regimes in many parts of the world, to defend itself and the free world from the communist plague. In this confrontation of the US with its mortal enemy, the Soviet Union, the former had no choice as to the moral and political regime status of these allies.


In normal circumstances a nation, espousing the values of freedom and democracy, would not generally ally itself with dictatorial and authoritarian regimes. In circumstances of crisis however, facing a mortal foe, such a nation is deprived of the luxury of choosing regimes, which share its own values and institutions, as allies. No wonder then, that the Taliban in Afghanistan during its war against the Soviets, was helped and supported by the US, as well as Saddam Hussein in his war against Iran, which the Americans considered had moved closer to the Soviets, and hence threatened to alter dangerously the balance of power after the overthrow of the Shah by the fundamentalist leader Khomeini. Not to mention other right wing regimes in Africa and Latin America, which were supported by the US, in their fight against left wing rebels, who were in turn aided by the Soviets, whose goal was to establish socialist regimes in their countries.


To students of world history, such alliances forged by the US, should be neither a puzzle nor a reason for condemning the latter. Nor should the US be denounced for the many errors and immoral actions it committed, during its defense of the West from the communist menace.

Infallibility is not a characteristic of humans, nor is angelic morality in crisis conditions. A superpower, burdened with the defense of its own interests and in the exercise of its heavy responsibilities on a global scale, will inevitably commit errors and violate morals in its clash of survival with a mortal enemy. But a benign superpower, imbued with civilized values, such as the US, will not perpetrate these violations willingly and with deliberation. In the realm of war, although Adrastea, Necessity, is the absolute sovereign and dictates the actions of all combatants, a civilized nation will do its utmost to desist from committing atrocities. In relation to its adversaries, the US never reached by a long distance the atrocities committed by its enemies. And one has to be reminded, that it was America, with all its faults, which saved the world from both nazi and communist totalitarianism. For this historic event alone, mankind should be grateful and thankful to the United States. (Australia itself was saved from Japanese occupation as a result of US military power). Only inveterate, pathological ingrates, would refuse to give America its due.


PRIME MINISTER'S FLAWED LOGIC


Bob Hawke’s argument that Australia would become a target of terrorists if it supported the US unilateral action on Iraq is remarkable for its incoherence and flawed logic. If indeed, permanent and non-permanent members of the Security Council of the UN, heeded and acted on Mr. Hawke’s advice, they would be foolish to authorize US military action against Iraq, if such authorization at the same time, would have made these nations targets of terrorism. His argument therefore that the US should have the imprimatur of the Security Council before it attacked Iraq, is according to his logic, a non sequitur, it would never materialize. Why should any of these nations give the US such authorization, if it is going to provoke the fury of terrorists to fall upon their own lands?


Moreover, if the implications of Mr. Hawke’s contention are, that the issuing of such a mandate by the Security Council, for some mysterious reason, would be respected by the terrorists and would restrain them from attacking nations which supported the US war after the issuing of such a mandate, then Mr. Hawke lives in-cloud-cuckoo-land.

It is almost impossible to believe, that after his forced retirement as PM, triggered by his former colleague and “enforcer”, Paul Keating, that Mr. Hawke has been afflicted by such maladies of illusion. What is more puzzling however, is why Mr. Hawke did not adopt the same position during his tenure as Prime Minister in the Gulf War, when he supported unquestionably and vigorously the senior Bush? Wouldn’t Australia have been such a target of the terrorists at the time, as a result of Mr. Hawke’s action? Mr. Hawke is locked in a golden cage of illusions, if he really believes that Australia will be immune from terrorist attacks if only it would not support US unilateral military action against Iraq. (The Bali terrorist attack must have been a sobering snowball hit on Mr. Hawke’s head. The terrorists must have known that most Australians were against a war on Iraq. Despite this knowledge, they did not desist from attacking Australians). Australia cannot afford to take the illusions of Mr. Hawke as wisdom coming from the mount, especially in the context of the Bali massacre. In a global context, the future holocaust fundamentalist Islam has in store for Western civilization, will be far worse than the Nazi holocaust.
There is nothing unusual or new about unilateral action in crisis conditions, either for nations or individuals, when one's life is at stake. And it is not unusual when someone’s life is under threat, that many of his “friends” will abandon him, especially when any help rendered by them to him will involve them in some risk. Only very few, the stalwartly loyal and the morally strong, will stand by him. And more often than not he might have to stand alone and fight for his survival. And this is the other broken leg of Mr. Hawke’s logic. Would he suggest to someone whose life is under immediate threat, not to take any defensive action against his identified foe until he is able to secure the permission of his would-be supporters? If Mr. Hawke mulishly persisted in giving such advice to such a person or nation, he could only do so at the expense of his intelligence and moral fortitude. But no strong person or nation would heed such advice of weakness.


THE IRREVOCABLE RIGHT TO DEFEND ONE'S COUNTRY


A nation under attack, as the US is at the moment by terrorists, once its intelligent organizations have the evidence in hand, (Can anyone doubt the efficiency of its intelligent services after the Bali bombing?) that a particular group, nation or group of nations sponsors and aids terrorists, has every right to defend itself by all means, including pre-emptive action, once it warns these nations of the dire consequences that would fall upon them, if they continued to support these terrorists.

And the Bush administration has done so repeatedly. It has warned these nations to dismantle all terrorist organizations and its financial backers immediately, and cease supporting terrorist activities. In addition, if these nations do not heed these grave warnings of the US, they would become targets of its military power. It is in this context that a US unilateral attack against its mortal enemies is fully justified. It is the only strategic alternative that a nation has for its survival. This is especially so, when a nation has to fight against invisible foes, such as terrorists, who strike without any warning and at random. The core question is, does a nation have any other alternative of preventing morally bereft terrorists, anointed by religious fanaticism, who are sure that they are guided by the hand of Allah, from attacking it by weapons of mass destruction? It is imperative that this question is answered not with pietist wishes, but by resolute and relentless action. Only the timorous and cravenly will lay prostrate before the apocalyptic mushroom cloud, that the terrorists are preparing to envelope Western civilization.

¨¨¨

The times are not for irresolute, fickle and pusillanimous political leadership. Complacent and Hamletinesque Clinton is no longer the occupier of the Oval Office. The former president, despite having knowledge that Iraqi intelligence was involved in the terrorist actions of the nineties, did not have the strength of character to confront this source of terrorism by military action, fearful that the casualties the US would sustain in a war with Iraq would shatter the complacency of his Administration and of the country, and that America would never feel “a touch of evil” (to quote the Orson Welles’ film). Instead he made the first bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993 wherein there was ample evidence that Iraqi intelligence was involved, a law enforcement issue and not a war issue, as it should have been. What will haunt the rest of his life will not be the scandals, the perjury, and his impeachment before Congress, but the collapse of the World Trade Center, as a result of his past inaction, or rather as a result of his cravenly refusal to deal and tackle with force, one of the main sources of terrorism, i.e. Iraq. And quite possibly, had he done so, this would have prevented the slaughter of September 11.

In contrast, the Bush Administration is resolute and determined to correct the lassitude and paralysis that emanated from the irresolute leadership of his predecessor, accepting this challenge of evil and responding to it with force. Furthermore, the President is timely wise not to be trapped by the politics played in the UN, especially of its Security Council, and await for the United Nations’ “Mandate of Heaven”, before the US acts with force against its mortal enemy and its terrorist allies.


The United Nations have been for many years a “Tower of Babel” - a welter of discord of conflicting interests and power plays between its member nations. Within such a situation it is difficult, and at times impossible, to receive majority support for a nation’s actions, particularly if such actions involve war and are to be taken by a superpower, such as the US. In this instance, two of the members of the Security Council, France and Russia have conflicting interests with the US, both of an economic and political nature, in the latter sphere as pretenders of global power. Hence, their opposition to the impending war against Iraq.


It is quite probable, of course, that ultimately the US will receive the backing of France and Russia for military action against Iraq, if the latter once again breaches the new resolutions of the UN. But the US should also have the indivisible and sovereign right to defend its citizens and its soil immediately, from enemy attack. And this is provided by article 51 of the UN Charter. Hence the US as a last resort, if it cannot procure the support of the Security Council for its use of force against Iraq, must act alone and unilaterally, without any pangs of conscience, against Saddam Hussein.

¨¨¨

Some people claim that the US war against Iraq is about control of the oil. Undoubtedly, oil is a strategic resource vital for the industrialized world and for the healthy state of its economy. But why was this important resource not an item in the agenda of the US in 1991 with the decisive defeat of Iraq in the Gulf War, when the Americans could obtain substantial control of the oil in Iraq, and became an issue only in 2001, after September 11?

Such a claim is totally nonsensical. Oil for the US is only a secondary issue. The primary issue is the deadly threat that Iraq poses against the US with its development of weapons of mass destruction, and the delivery of these weapons, either deliberately, or inadvertently and stupidly, in the hands of terrorists. The claim therefore, that an attack on Iraq is about the control of oil, has all the seriousness of saying that a person whose life is under immediate danger, is more concerned that his salad is oiled, than that of securing his own safety.


However, oil is important for America’s two allies, France and Russia, as both have substantial holding interests of this strategic resource in Iraq. That is why the concerted prevarication of these two major members of the Security Council, as to whether the latter should provide the inspectors of the UN a stronger resolution that would give them unfettered access to sites in Iraq, is so salient. Not to mention other possible mortal weaknesses prevailing in the power plays and procrastinations of France and Russia, such as envy of America as a superpower, and a modicum of schadenfreude in the suffering of the US in the aftermath of September 11, in seeing some wings clipped off from the American eagle. Hence the status quo in regards to Iraq, is not uncongenial to France and Russia especially when, blinded by their short-term interests, they cannot see that eventually their own countries will not remain immune from the massive and deadly attacks of Islamic terrorism.

¨¨¨


It is for all these reasons, that if the US will not finally get the support of the Security Council, because the latter is sunk in a quagmire of multilateral weakness, ultimately it must act unilaterally and pre-emptively against Iraq, and with those allies who have the historical insight and moral courage to stand by it. And the war against Iraq will be a walkover for the US and its allies. Despite the blustering of Saddam’s propaganda machine, Iraqis will not fight to save him.

In these critical times, when Western civilization is threatened to be swamped with a tidal wave of fanatic barbarism, Australia does not need the prescriptions of political quacks, or the vaticinations of false prophets. What it needs is wise and resolute Churchillian leadership, leading from the front, against the great threat posed by the terrorists and their state sponsors, not the myopic and weak leadership of the four fountainheads and of the Church Fathers, who, stung by the populist bee and being in a state of frenzy, are leading from behind.

The article was written on October 14, 2002